Feminist Theory and Practice--Flores
As Ch. 6 of CTP notes, feminist criticism offers diverse, heterogeneous perspectives on such important but problematic issues as the “definition and stability of a gendered identity” and how to characterize, recognize, and critique the “gender-based struggle for power over definition and meanings” (CTP 229). As Germaine Greer argued in the early 1970s, feminine stereotypes are acts of--or effects of--commodification within a system of patriarchal capitalism that deals in the display and exchange of women. Should “feminist” critics today continue to explore such exchanges of representations of women in literary texts? In the mid 1980s, Hélène Cixous argued that the “feminine” is largely absent from the patriarchal order of language, appearing only as negative, subordinated terms in a series of figurative, binary oppositions that produce and are produced by phallogocentrism (CTP 245). Rather than dwelling upon the “otherness” of feminine discourse, Luce Irigaray insists on the subversive, parodic, multivalent potential of écriture féminine. How do such assertions and observations affect your sense of what’s at stake in coming to terms with the genders of discourse? If we acknowledge the instability of subjectivity--with Julia Kristeva and other anti-essentialists--what happens to efforts to make a difference--a collective, political difference--in the name of “women” or “feminism?” Do the difficulties of defining “lesbian” writing (CTP 250-53) also inhabit feminist criticism in general? Criticism in general? What relations do “gender studies” or “men’s studies” bear to “women” studies? Myra Jehlen states that “speaking of gender does not mean speaking only of women. As a critical term ‘gender’ invokes women only insofar as in its absence they are essentially invisible. And it brings them up not only for their own interest but to signal the sexed nature of men as well, and beyond that the way the sexed nature of both women and men is not natural but cultural. In this sense, gender may be opposed to sex as culture is to nature so that its realtion to sexual nature is unknown and probably unknowable: how, after all, do we speak of human beings outside of culture?” (Critical Terms for Literary Study 265). After discussing the “performative” nature of gender, Jehlen declares provocatively: “It is logically impossible to interrogate gender--to transform it from axiom to object of scrutiny and critical term--without also interrogating race and class” (272). Can you explain, emulate, illustrate what Jehlen means?

Klages on Gender Theory

Klages on Judith Butler's Gender Trouble

Klages on Cixous and Poststructuralist Feminist Theory

Klages on Irigaray

Alcoff, Linda. "Cultural Feminism versus Poststructuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory." Signs 13.3 (1988): 405-36